


The Gorgas Files

by not100bees



Category: Original Work, The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Horror, No Eyepocalypse, it's in the universe of the magnus archives but it's its own thing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-08
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:53:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23062021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/not100bees/pseuds/not100bees
Summary: Formed in 1913 the Gorgas Files was created as a collection of statements of encounters with the supernatural. Stored in the Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library at the University of Alabama, the Gorgas Files offers a work study opportunity for University students studying a wide range of subjects from library science to journalism. It's a great opportunity, if only you can get past the omnipresent feeling that something is very wrong whenever you're down there.
Kudos: 1





	1. Say No to Math

"Hello? Hello? I think it's working. I've never used one of these things so I'm not sure if it's working. My name is Atlanta Turner, I am a sophomore English major, and this is my first day working in the Gorgas Files. I didn't even know this place existed. My main job is apparently recording quote-unquote problem statements into this dinosaur of a tape recorder. I suppose... that that's enough for now."

"Statement of Jerry Ward, regarding an encounter in B.B. Comer Hall. Original statement given December 4th, 2015. Audio recording by Atlanta Turner, file clerk at the Gorgas Files. Statement begins.

I am not crazy. It’s important that you know that I’m not. I have complete control of my faculties; I know reality from dreams. This was real.

There was a club meeting in B.B. Comer. Quiz Bowl. It was a Thursday night. It was one of the last meetings of the fall semester, so it was dark before I even got in. The sky was pitch black, without stars. Even in light bright Tuscaloosa you could usually see a star or two. The sky felt weirdly close. Oppressive. Like a black pillow lowering down to smother me. I shivered and pulled my jacket closer.

The meeting was nothing special, we did a couple trash packets because we didn’t have any tournaments until spring semester. It was fun. I was walking out when I realized I forgot my jacket. I told the other team members this and told them I was going to catch up and meet them at Cane’s later. I bitterly wish I had just toughed out the cold and gotten my jacket the next day.

The lights were still on, but alone they seemed dimmer, like they couldn’t penetrate the oppressive dark. I walked quickly, almost jogging up the stairs. I opened the door to the classroom where the meetings took place. Even now I don’t want to think about it.

There was a man standing in the classroom. From the back he looked fine. He was tall, with curly red hair that was in a Bob Ross style afro, and he was wearing a bright zig-zag rainbow pattern shirt. He was writing on the whiteboard, I didn’t recognize him.

“Oh, sorry. I thought…” I trailed off. This was the room. I knew it. I could even see my jacket draped across a desk. That was when I noticed what he was writing.

It was math, ostensibly. Numbers and symbols; plus signs, minus signs, times signs, Pi, e, squares, division, fractions, log of x raised to q times ten to the cosine power. And it was nonsense. I’m a math major, I know math, and this was nonsense. Scribbling. He stopped.

Every part of his body seemed to move independently, his head started to turn, then his shoulders, his torso, finally, his legs. I choked on my breath. He didn’t have eyes. No, that’s not quite right, it wasn’t that he lacked eyes, it was the inky voids that sat where his eyes should be. I hysterically wondered why he would bother with glasses, because circular glasses sat on his nose.

He started moving towards me, and I couldn’t move, terror rooted me to the spot. He got so close I should have felt his body heat, but there wasn’t any.

His face was inches from mine, I don’t know how I thought his eyes were black, they were every color at once, iridescent, like an oil spill, spiraling towards the center of his eyes. He adjusted his glasses and the spiral moved with the glasses, like they were his eyes.

“Do…you…like…my…art…?” He turned his head to face the whiteboard with a dry chuckle, “I…think…it’s…pretty….” He laughed after this and turned in his strange piecemeal fashion back to the board, and continued writing. He went off the board and continued writing on the wall.

I was terrified, but I had come this far for my jacket and goddamn if I was going to stop now. I grabbed the jacket and dashed out of the room. The building was… it wasn’t B.B. Comer anymore. The layout was different, it looked like B.B. Comer, the walls were the same, the floor was the same, but it was structured completely differently. I slowly walked, terrified out of my mind, towards where I thought the exit was. It was closed, and when I opened it, it was another classroom. I closed it and backed away. When I looked back, it was completely different again. The aesthetics were the same, but the layout was completely changed again. Or… or were the colors off? I couldn’t tell.

I don’t know how long I was in there. Days? Weeks? Months? Decades? Forever? Was this ever-shifting labyrinth reality and what I thought the real world was a beautiful dream? I don’t know. Nothing changed and nothing stayed the same. Then I saw him. The man without eyes. Standing in the distance, staring at me. I don’t know what I had done differently but there he was.

I increased my pace, getting to what I thought was an exit. It wasn’t. And when I looked back, it was different, but the man was closer. Just a little bit, but closer. I started running, trying every door and every time I looked back, he was closer. He wasn’t doing anything, but I knew if he got to me something... bad would happen. I pictured those horrible glasses speckled with blood.

The man got closer and closer without moving a muscle. Then, when he was maybe a yard from me I saw the eyeless man walking towards me in his strange piecemeal fashion, a piece at a time, like each body part was controlled by a different brain.

I froze. I wish I'd ran, I wish I'd decked him, anything. But all I did was stare at him and sob. I think I pissed my pants. All I could think about was that I couldn't remember the last words I'd said to my mom.

But he didn't attack me. He opened a door to a classroom. There was a man in there. He was older, 50 maybe. He was wearing the university uniform so I think he was a cleaner or something. 

"Oh God, you have to run you have to-"

The eyeless man pushed me out of the way moving faster and more fluidly than I'd ever seen him. He held the cleaner's hair in his hand as the ragged breaths of the cleaner rang out in the silence.

"No..."

And with a sudden violence the eyeless man smashed the cleaner's head against the floor with a sickening _CRACK_ that was muffled by the carpet. The cleaner didn't die, but his eyes were unfocused and he twitched in a way that people really shouldn't twitch. Then the eyeless man did it again and again and again until the cleaner's face wasn't much more than a bloody pulp. He was dead. He had to be. And I couldn't look away. The eyeless man did it again and the cleaner's skull broke open like an egg. The eyeless man started pulling at the cleaner's brain. And it unfurled like ribbons. The eyeless man held loops of brain, staring at it in what looked like amazement.

"He...had...such...a...nice...brain....too..." He frowned, "If only poor people more chances in this country." He weakly shook his head, "Sorry...it's...hard...to...keep...everything...in...line..." He dropped the loops of brain matter in one hand and scratched at his chin. His hand moved like the rest of the body didn't know that it was doing anything.

He dropped the rest of the loops and stood up and went to the whiteboard and started writing math again. "Do...you...think... it's...pretty...?"

I ran. I ran as fast as I could and when I saw the red exit sign I didn't stop to question it or think about it, I just booked it. I threw the door open and dashed down the stairs. I slipped and fell down but I was OUT.

I was gone for two days. Nobody noticed.

I can’t go back into B.B. Comer. Hell, I can barely pass it. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I feel like he’s watching me, everywhere I go, all the time. I don’t think there’s anything I can do.

Statement ends."

Atlanta sucked in a breath, "Okay. Hm. There isn't much that can be proven or disproven. Jerry dropped out in the spring semester of 2016, apparently he had a nervous breakdown. At one point a cleaner went missing, Eric Friedmann, he usually worked at B.B. Comer but there's nothing to prove that he disappeared _in_ B.B. Comer. This "eyeless man" _does_ match the description of a grad student from 1973, one Albert Dodd. I doubt it's him because he'd be 71 this June and because he also _died_."

"The odd thing is... Albert Dodd died. In 1973. Well, uh, that's not the odd thing. The odd thing is is that Albert Dodd was murdered. By having his skull cut open and his brain was carved out with a knife. Which is a lot like the way the "eyeless man" seemed to kill the cleaner. There's almost no way Jerry Ward could have known about Albert Dodd. Hm." Atlanta took in a sharp breath and scratched at the back of her head. "I'm just glad I don't have any classes in B.B. Comer this semester."

"Recording Ends."


	2. Once Upon a Time

“Statement of Amanda Green regarding the disappearance of her roommate and a strange book she'd found. Original statement given September 14th, 2018. Audio recording by Atlanta Turner, file clerk at the Gorgas Files. Statement begins.”

“I’ve always loved books. I learned to read early, at 4, I hadn’t even started kindergarten yet. But even before that my mom said that as soon as I could crawl, I’d crawl straight for the bookshelf and pull out my favorite and make her read it to me whenever she was home, and my grandma when she was watching me. It’s some of what made me want to be an English major.

My roommate, Charlie, used to tease me about how much time I spent reading. When I said that she was also always in our room she said at least she wasn't ignoring the rest of the world and reading a book she'd read 13 times before. That's not quite true. I've only read _The Great Gatsby_ 11 times.

I don’t know what you know about Morgan Hall, but on the stairs, on the landing just before the second floor, there’s a bookshelf where you can take books or place your own. I’ve found some really great ones, like this collection of Oscar Wilde short stories, or this copy of Beloved with notes all over it. I like to look at it when I have the time because you never know what you'll find there. 

I was heading out of my last class of the day, so I had some time. The class was on the third floor, so I had time to pass the lending shelf and I decided to look. 

I don’t know why it caught my eye. It was a children’s book, a picture book of “Rapunzel”, which was a little unusual as most of the books were donated by college students, but there’s always a few oddball books so it wasn’t unheard of. It was old, but not impressively so. Like, from the nineties. It wasn’t like “This is a children’s book from a different time, whoever read this probably has children now.” It was just sort of faded and gross in an unquantifiable way. 

I suppose it was the cover. The title was written on the front in cursive. It was this gorgeous painting of a tower from a top angle, with blonde hair flowing out of an unseen window and rose bushes growing up from the bottom. It was one of the prettiest book covers I’d ever seen. But it felt wrong somehow. Empty. There was nobody. There wasn’t a prince at the bottom of the tower. No witch climbing the hair. You couldn’t even see Rapunzel. But I was captivated nonetheless. I put the book in my bag and went back to my room. 

My roommate wasn’t there, which was a little weird, but I didn’t think too much about it. I spent around the next hour or so doing homework. And messing around on my laptop, but mostly homework. Eventually, I wanted to take a break from the screen, and I had just gotten a book. I pulled the book out of my bag, lay down on my bed, and start reading.

It didn’t have any copyright information or anything, not a title page or a listed author. Just a bookplate reading “From the library of Jurgen Leitner”.

But when I started reading it, it was… Rapunzel. A pregnant woman develops a craving for the vegetables in her neighbor’s garden, her husband gets caught taking the vegetables by the neighbor who is a witch and trades the child for the greens. The child, a girl with hair as yellow as gold, is named after the lettuce and locked up in a tower by the witch. 

Each page was mostly taken up by a picture that was just as lavish and detailed as the cover. The text was two or three sentences telling the story. But the weird thing was, nobody had a face. Well, you never saw it, their back was to the drawing, or the drawing stopped at their neck, cut off by the top of the page. 

Then the book got weird. Weirder anyways.

On like, the sixth page it showed the witch in the tower, sitting at a table with Rapunzel, it said, “And the Witch came every day to see Rapunzel.” It showed more of a face than the rest of the book, with Rapunzel’s smiling mouth just at the top of the page as she held a roll. 

The next page showed Rapunzel sitting in a chair at the window from behind. The text read “But one day the Witch didn’t come. Rapunzel waited.” 

On the next page it showed Rapunzel in the same chair in the same position. “And waited.” It wasn’t the same painting. A few things had moved, and it was just different enough that I could tell eventually, but at first, I kept flipping back and forth sure the book had just repeated the same page..

The next page was the same. Rapunzel sitting in a chair in the window with the text “And waited.”

“And waited.”

“And waited.”

“And waited.”

“And waited.”

This started on page nine of a book that had like, 40 or 50 pages. And no two pictures repeated exactly. They were just different enough that I could tell. 

On around the thirtieth page I noticed something at the window, grabbing at it, and I thought _Oh it’s the prince_ with some relief, a bit of normalcy in the story of Rapunzel I knew.

But on the next page I could tell what it was. It was some rose, growing up the tower.

Over the next few pages roses grew, covering everything, ever over Rapunzel.

The last page was just roses with the text, “But nobody came.”

I don’t know long I laid there reading. When I finally looked up it was like 9:30. My roommate still wasn’t back, which was weird cause she was always back by 9. I pulled out my phone to text her, but it had died. My laptop was dead too. I tried plugging it into the charger, but it wouldn’t light up. I groaned and went to leave my room; I had a friend on the floor below us whose phone I could borrow to get this sorted out. But when I went to leave the door wouldn’t open. The door wasn’t locked. I jiggled at the handle some but nothing. I looked through the peephole, but I didn’t see anything unusual. I started furiously shaking the door, but it wouldn’t budge. I screamed and yanked at the door and it finally came open. 

“Finally.” I muttered to myself. 

I went down the stairs, irritated, when I saw them. It was two people walking up the stairs. They didn’t have a face. Whatever you’re picturing isn’t it. It wasn’t blank, they still had heads, it wasn’t a hole or anything. They just, didn’t have faces. 

I had no idea what to do. I had no idea what was going on. The weirdest part was, the faceless people didn’t seem malicious. In fact, they didn’t seem like they noticed me at all. They didn’t react to my presence in any noticeable way.

“Hello?” Nothing.

I tried touching them. I could, but there was no reaction, no acknowledgment of me. 

I raced down the stairs to the lobby. There were more of these faceless people in the lobby and they also didn’t react at all. 

I waved my hands in front of their heads, screamed as loud as I could, grabbed their shoulders and shook as hard as I could, shoved them out of chairs they were sitting on, knocked over tables, but they didn’t react. They just continued whatever they were doing, just sat in the floor until they got up and moved somewhere else, dropped stuff from table height and picked it up later. 

Hours passed. The sun eventually rose but it was dim. It wasn’t cloudy, the sun just wasn’t as bright. It was also really foggy, and silent as the grave except for some faint music in the distance. 

A faceless person moved past me on the porch and opened the door. I sank down, sitting on the porch steps. I was going to be stuck here forever, where nobody talked to me or interacted, just walked silently past me. 

All because of books. How many times had I stayed at home reading instead of going out and interacting with people? Now I’d give up every book in the world if somebody would say “Hi.” to me and touch me on the shoulder. 

Books. I remembered my mom reading to me, trying to do voices but she was terrible at them. My grandma was much better at voices. I missed them. And I was probably never going to see them again. I thought about my mom’s meatloaf she’d make after she got back from school, grading papers right after dinner. I smiled, just a little, before bursting into tears. 

“Are you okay?”  
I looked up startled, it was a girl leaving Harris. She had a face! And she was talking to me! 

“Yeah, I’m fine.” I wiped at my tears and booked it back to my room. My phone was fine, charged. 

“Hey Mom?”

“Amanda? What’s wrong?”

“I just love you.”

“I love you too. I’ve got to go, I’m about to leave for work.”

“Alright.”

I cried again, but with happiness this time. 

Then I remembered the book. I whirled around to my bed, but it was gone. I couldn’t find it. And my roommate never came back. 

I’m fine, I’m going to therapy, I’m still even reading, but I can’t do fairy tales. I was supposed to read some Hans Christian Andersen for a class, but I barely started before I had an episode. But It’s fine. I’m fine. It’s Charlie I’m worried about. You can find her right? It’s what you do, you investigate. It’s been a couple weeks and I’ve tried everything I can think of. I barely lasted a couple hours, I can’t imagine what a few weeks looks like. Please you’ve got to. Please.”

“Statement ends.”

“There’s not much to go on here. Amanda Green’s roommate Charlotte White was reported missing on September 13th. The preliminary investigation proved that no book of Rapunzel matching the description was printed. We looked into the bookplate at the front, Jurgen Leitner is some eccentric book collector from England with urban legends saying that his books are cursed, we couldn’t contact him, he’s apparently been out of public life for several years.”

Atlanta rubbed at her eyes.

“Charlotte White was never found. But.” She swallowed, “But on September 19th a selfie uploaded to Instagram contained what appeared to be a dead body in the background. It was quickly reported and taken down but the woman in the picture matches Charlotte White’s description. The police investigated but they never found anything, they said that the picture of the dead body was a horrible prank. Those who saw it say that wounds on the dead body were apparently self-inflicted.”

“Recording ends.”


End file.
